74. Tribunals: New York City Ballet and new Edmund White novel, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
News! Mme Beach has briefly visited our U.S., straight from her lengthy Russian travels and, thankfully, just prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Liane skipped Manhattan this time (because of Covid) and went straight to Bayonne, New Jersey, to participate in a special interrogation prep by the Bayonne Universal Team Tribunal, a certification bureau for ballet companies (and potentially all arts and sciences) to ensure Ultimate Political Correctness. Mme Beach skyped us immediately upon arrival, of course, apologizing for not being able to include Manhattan on her schedule but eager to hear about plans for our upcoming New York company, The Ballet. (Our canny leader Louise Ebersdorf suspects that La Beach wishes to poach from our choreographic talent pool -- especially young Cheryl and Sandy -- but that won’t happen, no sir-ree.) Beach claims that her Parisian all-female ballet company, Le Swing, is the most ideologically correct such enterprise on earth, and that it should have no trouble being certified by BUTT, especially since the Tribunal has connections with Princeton University, where Mme claims friends among its professors, administrators, trustees, student activists and alumni. Le Swing will be globally recognized, she claims, as the least colonialist, imperialist, white male suprematist (it is to laugh!), and guilt denialist of any company on the planet. (It certainly has no “male sex criminals” on staff now that two partnering coaches have been quietly “retired”.)
Ambitious Liane spent days in exploratory talks with the Bayonnne Committee for Pubic Safety about the security protocols in force around her Parisian dancers to protect them from off-stage encounters with biological males and to ensure that their mandatory martial arts training keeps them in fighting readiness to counter toxic fans. (Oh, those Frenchmen!) Liane told me privately that she has achieved a coup: she is in talks with film director Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Petite Maman) to devise a mistresswork for Le Swing! Of course, all Parisian performances of the Swingers now include a land acknowledgment statement declaring that the Marais plot upon which the company’s jewel box of a theater resides was originally occupied by members of ancient Parisii tribes. That should be sufficient recognition of any Gallic predecessors on the sacred ground.
Mme assured us that she and the young members of the Bayonne Tribunal got along superbly (“très simpathetique” was her accolade), so the future certification of Le Swing should be no problem and will pave the way for a coming U.S. tour of the company post-Covid. Liane allowed that she would like to set up an equivalent Tribunal in France with native officials and perhaps one or two American adjunct consultants, once Le Swing has been cleared in the U.S. All in the tradition of the original French Revolutionary Tribunal (FRT). It makes total sense.
I was reminded of Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, with its magical underworld Zone and its dire Tribunal when the poet travels to rescue his Eurydice. Cocteau faced official enquiries himself in the aftermath of the Second World War, and he was eventually cleared of collaboration. His movie’s scenes of interrogation are the heart of the work. They evoke a true chill after seventy years. They force you to take the themes of poiesis and sacrifice seriously.
Our Louise is shrewd. She offered to allow La Beach to view a video of the work that Albertine and Paco have arranged for Louise’s twenty-one prize-winning felines, Catalytics. (Notice that this ploy distracts from any possibly inconvenient interest in the choreographic works of Cheryl and Sandy.) Mme Beach agreed that she could readily imagine how her circus-mad Parisians might cherish a “creature act”. Albertine was consulted, and she consented to a digitally recorded performance. Paco ultimately manned the equipment to make the video. (The dress rehearsals on the Thirty-third Floor were achieved in complete secrecy, and only Louise, Master Raro, and I witnessed the live performance before the cameras.)
I can say (spoiler alert, but not really) that Sandy’s early description of the work is basically accurate, after his one surreptitious viewing of a nocturnal rehearsal months ago. By some miracle, Louise’s cat wranglers (A&P) have trained the kitties to circle a priestess-like Albertine, faster and faster, until she seems to faint in their midst, and the animals crowd over and around her, covering her recumbent figure at black-out. (My pet Murr would never so stoop.) The ritual is performed to a commissioned score by David Teie. Our Louise was not so impressed by Albertine (“such a ham!” our little Lulu pronounced), but she was thrilled speechless by her brilliant felines: the proud owner exults. The video was promptly streamed to New Jersey (with A&P’s approval), and La Beach generously praised the performers, the trainers, and especially Albertine’s authority. Beach asked Albertine’s age and whether she has had any children.
And Liane did not come alone to our shores (the good news continues)! Beach informed us that she had brought her Russian associate, the geneticist Valery Wonkoff to our West, he who has been breeding what he refers to as Denisovan Ballerinas in deepest Siberia. He and Beach plan a fertility clinic in Bayonne (which has a convenient depilatory factory nearby) and to install Wonkoff there to continue his hybridization experiments. Wonkoff accompanied Mme Beach to Bayonne; the Franco-Russo duo surveyed the New Jersey environs. Presumably, Wonkoff has some Baby Denisovan Ballerinas in reserve back in Yakutsk, and one day we may have American specimens if all goes well. Again, Liane texted me privately that her dream is to have an equivalent breeding center in France, also supervised by her Russian genius, of course. She imagines a special Committee for Genomic Security in Wonkoff’s field of assisted evolution. Having concluded their N.J. field trip, Liane and Wonkoff flew on to Paris. Wonkoff will not be returning to Siberia since the current Ukraine military actions make travel difficult. And President Vladimir Putin may be facing an eventual War Crimes Tribunal.
But you can’t pull the wool over Louise’s eyes. Our leader says that she knows how to breed ballerinas better than any Russian and that she and Belle and Mme Sesostris are a Tribunal of Tribunals, as far as she is concerned. Louise claims she is accountable to no one when it comes to The Ballet and she will never play Danton to Liane’s Paul Barras. My boss and her confederates continue to work toward their new company, which will open at our own begemmed theater on the Hudson (The Louise) post-Covid, with an all-feline bill consisting of a de-triggered version of La Chatte, Cheryl’s Nekomata, the “Puss in Boots” pas de deux, and the A&P Catalytics, the latter destined to have its world premiere in the Big Apple rather than in Petite Paris. The Louise is going to be a “safe space” for true balletomanes.
Master Raro and I went to several performances during New York City Ballet’s recent abbreviated season at Lincoln Center. I was again struck by the erotic “realism” of Balanchine’s Serenade. (I referred to it in one of my reviews as a “von Stroheim ballet”.) My readers will remember that I see the Waltz Girl revealing her mirror-image relation to the Poet in the final movement – the Elegy – of the ballet. She has had a career of failed romances because – like him – she wants all the romantic partners that happen by, and in each case her/his heart is broken. This would partially explain Balanchine’s brief switching of the point of view of the ballet to the Poet in the Elegy: the Waltz Girl will ultimately come to recognize herself in his romantic quandary. The cast that I caught this season included Sterling Hyltin as the Waltz Girl, Emilie Gerrity as the Dark Angel, and Erica Pereira as the Russian Ballerina. The Dark Angel role was designated “The Wife” by Balanchine in conversation with Danilova, and he emphasized the emotional promiscuity (at least) of the Waltz Girl. We are to assume she has had many waltz partners over the years. You see what I mean by “realism”.
What I also noticed this season was the way the Russian Ballerina is used to predict the theme of heartbreak when we notice her in the second half of the Sonatina movement. It is the Russian ballerina who suddenly collapses and lies prone on the stage floor. Her immobile figure is immediately joined by fifteen corps women who arrange themselves in a kind of protective architecture about her figure. I have always seen this “building” as a kind of temple (a temple of love?) and each separate grouping of three ensemble dancers as a columnar support for the shelter. What I now think Balanchine is referring to is the Greek tradition of incubation, wherein a “patient” (here, someone who has become love-sick) spends a night in an Aesclepian temple and is hopefully cured of his or her infirmity by morning. And, indeed, this would explain why the Russian Ballerina eventually rises and resumes dancing when the ballet’s “temple” deconstructs itself.
In other words, the blinding romantic moonlight which we see in the ballet’s opening imagery has led the Russian Ballerina to seek a cure for a broken heart. She is then able to dominate the dancing in the ballet’s third movement (the Tema Russo), and she also invades the final Elegy twice to admonish the Poet there that, long before the Dark Angel and the Waltz Girl, she was his beloved. Now she is the Other Woman, returning as a reminder and a warning. The Waltz Girl takes note that she herself is essentially third in line. And that she has been as guilty of amatory blindness as the Elegy’s Poet.
As he is taken away into the wings (by the Dark Angel-Wife), so she will be accompanied toward the wings by Serenade’s corps dancers in the final moments of the ballet. I was fascinated to see the way Balanchine arranges for a kind of tumbril (six ballerinas turning in place) to transport her to that apotheosis. I interpret the final moments of the ballet as the Waltz Girl’s decision to put her previous life of romantic turmoil behind her. Perhaps she will become a ballerina rather than an Eros-raddled victim? As she arches her back before the light, she offers her throat to a guillotine of her own devising, ending a previous life in order to be born anew. She has faced her own Revolutionary Tribunal. Balanchine once said that the ballet should be called “Ballerina” – as in “the making of a dance artist”.
What would have caused this choreographer to evoke such a powerful image of final transport at the end of his ballet? The work premiered in early 1935 at the Adelphi Theater in New York. At the end of that year, the Ronald Coleman movie A Tale of Two Cities featured tumbrils. In the 1920s, filmgoers had watched Lillian Gish transported to a guillotine in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm. In the mid-Thirties, New York audiences would have been aware that Spain was heading toward what would turn out to be a tragic civil war. Like today in Ukraine, self-sacrifice was in the air. The Russian Ballerina role was the last to be added to Balanchine’s vision as the work developed over the years. She was the last piece of erotic evidence to be introduced toward a final balletic judgment.
There were many debuts during the NYCB season, some of them promising. We heard much criticism of the inclusion of the Peter Martins “Black Swan pas de deux” in programs that featured a revival of the one-act Balanchine Swan Lake. Covid must have made production of the Martins two-act version risky (there are several children in its cast). Therefore, as a “compensation”, the famous fouetté machine was provided. And, of course, an expected Swan-maddened populace filled the house to near capacity. The only NYCB ballerina who was able to illuminate the warhorse with past, present, and prospective nuances was Tiler Peck. At the end of this Odile’s fouettés, Peck produced a controlled, sudden de-accelerando in mid-turn that was breathtaking. And her contrapposto effects were all musically alert and more period than any de-codings of dusty dance notations could ever be. So Cecchetti. Peck’s partner was the elegant Jovani Furlan. I will be interested to see how he is coached into the Balanchine repertory.
The most striking Odette in the Balanchine pocket Swan Lake was Unity Phelan. Whereas the other ballerinas seemed hesitant to provide the house portrait with a convincing feminine vulnerability (perhaps fearful of female stereotyping), Phelan gave us a Swan Queen magically tremulous in the smallest details of her plastique. The stability of her plumb line was allowed to be evidentiary in the most momentary sous-sous. Phelan also revealed a delicacy in her arms and head that is unique in the company. Here is a dancer that many dance-makers exploit only for her flexibility and high extensions: her silhouette’s “modern” line. But Phelan’s dance imagination encompasses so much more. Her ballerina signature evades the stereotype as though by instinct. She needs a more classically adept partner as her Siegfried. My Master Raro capitulated to Phelan’s Odette, and you know his standards are very high.
I can recommend a richly satiric novel that has appeared: Edmund White’s A Previous Life (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Cheryl guided me to White’s A Saint from Texas, and now she has loaned me her copy of his latest fiction. What a romp it turns out to be.
Life is set in the future when heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality have become boring and have been replaced by “polysexuality”, which means experiencing all known forms of sexual experimentation – and some unknown until found. The protagonist is a titled Sicilian who is not only fabulously wealthy but a world-famous harpsichordist on perpetual tour and perpetually on the make.
Ruggero is a sexual athlete and a soulbreaker (inevitably) since he combines the allure of a versatile expert in bed for all comers and a Latin fury at any misdemeanor on the part of a lover who might stray. This does not prevent Ruggero from keeping an eye out for new partners while himself engaged in a torrid affair. His Sicilian jealousy is hair-triggered. (I believe there is a touch of Nabokov’s Van Veen in White’s poly-playboy.) At the beginning of the novel Ruggero is recovering from a skiing accident and arranges for his current young wife, Constance, to write and read her most intimate memoirs to him, while he reciprocates in kind. White manages much hilarity in the congruence and contrast between Ruggero’s slavish wife, continually suffering from any sign that he may become bored with her, and Ruggero’s triumphant path from one lover to another, of whatever class, gender, or sexual itch. Eventually Constance cannot take any more pain from his auto-recital and moves on to an American husband who is wealthy, bland, and slavishly dedicated in contrast to Ruggero.
In the meantime, Ruggero begins an affair with an aged character named “Edmund White”, who has a more commodious willingness to be pleasured and tortured, but who is at length “on” to Ruggero’s possessiveness and self-love. In Edmund White’s (the author’s, not the character’s) ultimate view, the laws that initiate and end passionate affairs are the same no matter how multitudinous the serial lovers of whatever persuasion. At the end of the novel, Ruggero is enjoying his twilight years in Provence as the love-object of a married couple – descendants of “Edmund White” – who clearly are awaiting a munificent inheritance at his demise. The novel describes its satiric version of sensual hell with a combination of dark humor and light surrealism. Its structure delivers Ruggero before a Tribunal made up of Constance, “Edmund White”, and our real-world author.
My dear Cheryl praised the comic vision of A Saint from Texas by suggesting it was a combination of Buster Keaton and Luis Buñuel. I agree. When Ruggero and his “Edmund White” send rapturous emails to one another, baying undying love, it’s a comic opera of Rossinian dimensions. Actually, A Previous Life should be turned into an opera, perhaps with music by Thomas Adès, who recently put a narrative derived from Buñuel onto the operatic stage.
One of the chief delights of the new novel is the way it parodies the language of pornography, turning that limited verbal code into something like folk poetry. But, then, wasn’t pornography always a kind of parody of “the real thing” and innately comic, especially when solemnly expressionistic?
Edmund White stripped of his scare quotes has a field day. So does his reader.
P.H.
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